Another totally new thing in Expression Media 2: Silverlight HTML galleries. Granted, we only shipped one with the product, but another will be downloadable soon. We expect that people will also develop their own and want to share them.

What's so different about Silverlight galleries?

• Creative and Dynamic
• Movies play in place
• Sound Effects
• Modern Look

So, let's take a look at the one we ship with Expression Media 2. It's called Scatter. You create the gallery just as you would use any of the other templates shipped with Expression Media:

1. Select the images you want to include
2. On the Find menu, Show selected
3. On the Make menu, click HTML Gallery
4. Enter the name for your gallery under Site Title
5. Select Scatter under the Theme dropdown
6. Set other options like thumbnail size, Media size, watermark, etc. as desired
7. Click Make
8. Choose a directory to build the gallery in, and click OK

It's that simple! The results? First of all, the thumbnails come up in a scatter pattern. Each time someone goes to the site, the pattern is different:

Mouse over a thumbnail, and it straightens up and grows a bit:

Click on an image, and it's displayed enlarged and superimposed on the index page:

Click on the arrow to go to the next page, and the thumbnails slide off to left - the new ones slide in from the right - accompanied by a swishing sound. If there are several pages, and you click on the first page or last page arrow, all of the pages between slide by quickly. Altogether a more impressive showing than the older style gallery.

If you would like to learn more about Silverlight development itself, you can find it on MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb188743.aspx.